PotNoodleTech

I think if your intending to spend more money on "new" SIMS products in this day and age then your living life wrong. I wish I could get rid of it here but so far not able to.

This may not help but we dumped trolleys and went to 1:1 with the Chromebooks given to the pupils to use 24/7. Kills 2 birds with one stone as a) gets rid of the need to constantly look after and move trolleys and b) they can do homework any time any day they want outside of school. Well 3 birds really as recent events have proved c) allows you to deliver distance learning instantly during an emergency with zero planning or setup

There's a separate configuration program called Net2 Configuration (we have this installed on a server). That has more settings in it including some kind of test mode that makes the controllers beep. My advice would be to contact the installer who has left it like that and get them to remedy the situation!

Well done mate great work and good photos.

Not if you repair them in house it isn't!

It's hard to quantify as each school is totally different and has totally different attitudes to IT and support staff. Here we have expanded our IT significantly with 1:1 and I have taken almost all services (apart from SIMS) in house which has saved vast quantities of money but has also increased our staff requirement but we still only have 1 IT tech full time on the ground which actually is no more than I had back in 2010 and with less than a quarter of the equipment. So we are still significantly understaffed. Just the cost savings alone from the local education authority's hardware SLA which we opt out of, pays for 0.7 of my full time tech so if you are willing to think outside the box and go though the numbers precisely you may find you can justify hiring more staff. I've easily saved my own salary sometimes via negotiating new contracts and leases and playing hardball with suppliers but the school doesn't really appreciate that fact.

Ah I get you.

Very nice this sounds like a damn good idea.

or buy Veeam

There's the print queue issue as specified above - you'd likely need two queues for the two makes of MFD. There also a licencing issue on the actual papercut install - for example my papercut licence is covered as part of my Ricoh contract, if I then moved to Kycoera my Ricoh papercut licence would become invalid and that papercut install may become disabled at some point - can you still use the old installation and just add a new licence to it? I don't know. Can you run the old installation with half the KM licence and half the Kyocera licence? I don't know but probably not. So it may be the licencing issue your LEA is referring to as a significant problem rather than the print queue issue.

Hmm one way around this could be to use some internal only radio station streaming software and just set up a playlist with 5 tracks on repeat for each pupil and mandate a shortcut directly to the playlist on their Chromebook? That would be a technical way of solving it without it being too cumbersome. As for a legal way of solving it, as the OP mentioned we are not lawyers or solicitors we're just poor overworked IT bods, so I won't give any advice other than - as far as I am aware no matter what licences you have - the school would still need to own the music, each track i.e either buy the cd or pay for the download on itunes or whatever.

Ideally run a separate disk group for the O/S e.g most modern dells etc can take 2 x SSD in the rear by the PCIE slots for the O/S. If your server doesn't have that then one disk group.

Ah so you've already backed up the M365 data to the nas and you're just offloading to USB? I get you. USB is slow!

Your internet connection is probably the limiting factor though I would have thought. Hopefully it's being throttled as I wouldnt fancy spending 14 days blocking up out internet pipe for the whole school!

Tested it. Costs more. Quite a bit more.

Well - quaterly gas bill in - double the price of last year and I was being frugal this year and not not so frugal last year (though I think it was colder this year overall) Nasty.

Check in your google admin, Devices > Chrome > Settings > Users and Browsers >> URL Blocking and check you don't have anything accidentally blocked in there as that would only get blocked once the user signs in to the browser I believe.

The DC power supply is usually reserved for larger datacentres or small off grid type comms rooms that runn of 48v battery banks - it's more efficient to run the kit in these situations directly off 48v battery power than to convert up to 240 and back down to 48v inside the equipment (that geneerally wastes 10-20% energy). It's pretty specialist kit needed and not generally something schools need to worry about.

Sign me up! Sounds better than school! :S

Servers generally come with compeltely blank disks so you will probably have to gointo the BIOS/RAID bios and set up any disk arrays you want followed by booting the Windows Server 2019 or above memory stick and installing the O/S

Just imagine your oppenent is your line manager that should do the trick! BOOOM BABY!!!!

This is a really interesting thread. Clearly we are only supposeed to retain information whilst it is relavent and if it is reasonable. How would you cope with an official investigation for example into professional standards or the like if your deleting everything within one year? I've been involved in investigations in the past where the school had to go back several years in order to literally prove someone innocent and save their job/career, which was successful. If all that email evidence was not there 12 months on then things could be very different for that person. Is that it now - we say sorry mate GDPR has made us incapable of proving any form of wrongdoing or wrightdoing?

WDS on it's own is VERY limited but it serves as a PXE boot point for images generated from MDT. If your running MDT i believe you need WDS too (at least I always have run both!!)

This. This is how we run it. If a pupil changes their password, if they are already logged into the chromebook it would be with their old password, it may prompt for the new pasword at some stage. Once they sign in with their new password the chromebook will ask them to type in their old password in order to unlock their old profile. If they can not remember this they must click forgot and then proceed. A new profile will be created on the chromebook with their new password and any data from their old profile that has not been uploaded to google drive willl be lost. There's no way round that bit as the chromebook profiles are encrypted and linked to the password at the time so you forget your old password - no decrypt for you.

What make and model of UPS is it? Generally UPS's up to 2200va roughly would come with a bog standard C13 kettle lead and the2200 - 3000 may come with C19 ones. Anything bigger would probably need hard wiring like the pair of 5000's I run.